On "sex" and "sexuality" in China: a conversation with Pan Suiming

Genitalia-related nursing embarrassment and its associated factors among female nurses in mainland China: a nationwide cross-sectional study

Background

Genital-related care is a common nursing procedure and may cause embarrassment for nurses. However, nurses’ level of embarrassment and the factors associated with embarrassment have been scarcely studied. Therefore, a cross-sectional study was conducted to investigate genitalia-related care’s embarrassment and its associated factors among Chinese female nurses.

Methods

Online questionnaires regarding the frequency of genitalia-related care and the embarrassment level were distributed to female nurses from the gynecology and urology departments between October and December 2019. Participants also completed the Chinese version of the professional identity scale for nurses and the Jefferson scale of empathy. Mantel-Haenszel chi-square and ordinal logistic regression were used to explore factors associated with the level of embarrassment.

Results

In total, 648 female nurses from 54 hospitals in 31 cities in China were recruited. Among these respondents, approximately 67% provided genitalia-related care at least three days per week, and about 70% of nurses felt slightly embarrassed to extremely embarrassed when providing genitalia-related care. Compared to nurses from gynecology departments, nurses from urology departments felt more embarrassed during genitalia-related care (P<0.001). Ordinal regression analysis showed that the odds of nurses from gynecology and urology departments with total empathy scores greater than 100 experiencing higher levels of embarrassment than nurses with total empathy scores less than 100 were 0.47 and 0.45, respectively. Nurses from gynecology departments with higher professional identity scores, higher education levels, more frequent genital-related care experienced less embarrassment, while nurses from the urology department with prior sexual experience experienced less embarrassment.

Conclusions

Feeling embarrassed during genitalia-related nursing was common among Chinese female nurses, especially those from urology departments. Embarrassment during genitalia-related nursing was related to professional identity, empathy, educational level, genitalia-related care frequency, and sexual history. These findings highlight the importance of professional identity, empathy, and education among nurses.

Sexual Mixing in Shanghai: Are Heterosexual Contact Patterns Compatible With an HIV/AIDS Epidemic?

China's HIV prevalence is low, mainly concentrated among female sex workers (FSWs), their clients, men who have sex with men, and the stable partners of members of these high-risk groups. We evaluate the contribution to the spread of HIV of China's regime of heterosexual relations, of the structure of heterosexual networks, and of the attributes of key population groups with simulations driven by data from a cross-sectional survey of egocentric sexual networks of the general population of Shanghai and from a concurrent respondent-driven sample of FSWs. We find that the heterosexual network generated by our empirically calibrated simulations has low levels of partner change, strong constraints on partner selection by age and education, and a very small connected core, mainly comprising FSWs and their clients and characterized by a fragile transmission structure. This network has a small HIV epidemic potential but is compatible with the transmission of bacterial sexually transmitted infections (STIs), such as syphilis, which are less susceptible to structural breaks in transmission of infection. Our results suggest that policies that force commercial sex underground could have an adverse effect on the spread of HIV and other STIs.

Modelling the spread of HIV/AIDS in China: the role of sexual transmission

The study presented here is an exploration of the implications of patterns of sexual behaviour for the spread of HIV in China, using a bio-behavioural macrosimulation model. To reflect the uncertainty surrounding key parameters, analyses of varied scenarios are used to show a range of possible outcomes consistent with variations in selected biological and behavioural inputs. The latter are estimated from a nationwide survey of sexual behaviour recently conducted in China, a country with an emerging HIV/AIDS epidemic, where it is feared that HIV/AIDS will spread to the general population via heterosexual transmission. The results highlight the primacy of the levels and distribution of sexual activity in the population. They offer some guidelines for understanding and interpreting the potential implications of current and prospective changes in sexual behaviour for the spread of HIV/AIDS in the world's largest population, and also highlight the need to collect better data on sexual behaviour for the estimation of key model inputs.